YAML

• Review Pixie's requirements to make sure that your Kubernetes cluster is supported.

• Determine if you already have Operator Lifecycle Manager (OLM) deployed to your cluster, possibly to the default olm namespace. Pixie uses the Kubernetes Operator pattern to manage its Vizier, which handles data collection and query execution (see the Architecture diagram). The OLM is used to install, update and manage the Vizier Operator.

The CLI is used to get Pixie's YAML files. You can install the Pixie CLI following the directions here.

Check if your K8s cluster meets Pixie's requirements by running:

px deploy --check_only

If your cluster fails any checks, you may still proceed with installation, but it is unlikely that Pixie will work on your cluster.

Create a deployment key following the directions here.

Run the following CLI command to extract Pixie's manifest files:

# Extract YAML (No OLM present on cluster).
px deploy --extract_yaml ./ --deploy_key <PIXIE_DEPLOYMENT_KEY>
# Extract YAML (OLM already exists on cluster).
px deploy --extract_yaml ./ --deploy_key <PIXIE_DEPLOYMENT_KEY> --deploy_olm=false
# Extract YAML (Self-hosting Pixie Cloud).
px deploy --extract_yaml ./ --deploy_key <PIXIE_DEPLOYMENT_KEY> --dev_cloud_namespace plc
# Extract YAML (configure Pixie with a specific memory limit - 2Gi is the default, 1Gi is the minimum recommended)
px deploy --extract_yaml ./ --deploy_key <PIXIE_DEPLOYMENT_KEY> --pem_memory_limit=1Gi

Note: The extracted YAMls does not include manifests for each sub-component of Pixie. It includes manifests for etcd, NATS and the cloud-connector service which downloads the manifests for the necessary services and daemonsets.

Deploy Pixie in your target cluster by running:

# Deploy Pixie
tar -xvf yamls.tar
kubectl apply -f pixie_yamls/

Pixie will deploy pods to the pl, px-operator, and olm(if deploying the OLM) namespaces.

For more deploy options that you can specify to configure Pixie, refer to our deploy options.

To verify that Pixie is running in your environment you can check the admin page or run:

# Check pods are up
kubectl get pods -n pl
# Check Pixie Platform status
px get viziers
# Check PEM stats
px get pems

CLI (Recommended)Helm